I had two six-hour drives this week. Normally I would listen to a mix of podcasts and music on such trips, but recently Spotify launched an expansive audiobook offering and there were a couple of books that were right around that six-hour mark that showed up in my feed. I opted to listen to these instead, The Psychology of Money and The Courage to Be Disliked. These are two different books, one from a financial reporter telling short stories to exemplify different mental models around money and how not to get wiped out financially and the other a distillation of a school of psychology presented in a form similar to Plato’s Dialogues. Both presented ideas that I’ve continued to turn over in my head but I’ve not had the opportunity to discuss either with anyone else.

I don’t need Spotify in order to listen to audiobooks. It also isn’t necessary to use Audible or any other paid platform. I could just use Overdrive and combined with a library card have access to any number of audiobooks. I’ve even used Overdrive in the past, most commonly when I wanted to indulge in some escapism during my metro commute in DC. Yet now I don’t do that now. Perhaps the fact that I chose to listen to books at all during these rides is a testament to recommendation algorithms more than anything else. While there is definitely a risk of getting stuck in an information bubble with such algorithms, it was good to be fed a few things (presumably based on my podcast listening history) that brought some variety to my information intake.

I’ve found it a waste of time to listen to dense non-fiction. Such reading requires too many pauses to allow things to sink in that are not conducive to an audio format. I’ve tried a few times in the past and it hasn’t worked. In this newsletter I even wrote about an attempt to read and listen to a book at the same time to maximize information absorption. That didn’t work either. The sort of book that works in audio format for me is something lighter, the sort of book that could be part of an oral tradition. I suspect I’m not alone in that. While I’m not anticipating any more long drives like that for a while, recommendations are always welcome.